The ski industry discards thousands of skis each year either as factory seconds from the manufacturing process or as old skis at the end of their useful life. Throughout North America and Europe, these discarded skis generally make their way to land fill sites creating a significant volume of waste.
With thousands of skis being discarded each year there are obviously environmental concerns with respect to such wasteful activities and, accordingly, there is a need for new and innovative uses for discarded skis in order to reduce the number of skis which ultimately end up at a land fill site. However, as a basic raw material, old or factory second skis come in a huge variety of lengths, colors, designs and shapes and previously, have not been considered useful as a raw material source for proposed consumer products.
Common amongst skis, however, is the fact that they are generally manufactured as highly durable and structurally-strong objects for their intended use as recreational items in a demanding environment. Accordingly, under the basic exterior structure of a ski is an underlying raw material of significant strength and uniformity which could be used in new products. One such use is as marker which may be used for the identification of underground cables (i.e. utility markers), as highway or railway markers, as miscellaneous use markers for delineating boundaries such as driveways or gardens or as a boundary marker at ski resorts or any open area where it is required to create or mark off specific boundaries. Another use would be in support for signage or fencing.
Hereinbefore, however, skis have not been considered for such an applications. A review of the prior art has shown utility or road markers specifically manufactured from raw materials for such purposes and are described as such in U.S. Pat. 4,249,357 (Cornou) as a synthetic-resin road marker having a specific extruded form. Examples of other utility markers include those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,078,867, which describes the specific structure of a traffic marker post specifically manufactured for such a use.
A still further example of a utility road marker is that which is described in re-issued Pat. No. 32,045 (Schmanski, re-issued Dec. 10, 1985) which also describes a flexible highway maker having a specific form.
Still further and related to ground marker systems, U.S. Pat. No. 4,939,877 (Claffey) describes an anchor device for supporting the post of signs, flags, road markers and the like.
An example of a use for factory second skis is described in U.S. Design Pat. No. 345,656 (Theobald) which describes the ornamental design of a "Adirondack" type chair in which the back of said chair is manufactured from a plurality of skis cut to different lengths.
However, the above mentioned patents do not describe the modification of a ski in order to facilitate its use as a marker.